WASHINGTON 1994 Cold Case Solved After 10 Years — Justice for the Rafay Family
On the night of July 12th, 1994, three members of the Rafé family were beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat in their home in Belleview, Washington.
Tariq Rafé, an engineer, his wife, Sultana, and their 20-year-old daughter Bosma, an autistic young woman who was completely defenseless.
The family had just moved from Vancouver, Canada, only 4 months earlier.
A new dream in a new land.
At 2 am on July 13th, Sebastian Burns, 18, the best friend of the family’s only son, called 911.
Police found Tariq and Sultana dead in two separate rooms.
Bosma, the only victim still breathing, died in the hospital a few hours later.
She took the secret of who killed her family to the grave.
The only surviving son was Aif Rafé, 18, a firstear student at Cornell University.
He was standing right there at the scene with Sebastian.
No fingerprints, no DNA, no witnesses.
But police had two young men who rented movies the night after the murders, shed not a single tear, did not attend the family funeral, and took a bus across the Canadian border on the very day the three victims were buried.
In Vancouver, both were beyond the reach of American detectives.
Lawyers cut off contact.
The case froze.
It would take nearly a year of deadlock, one of the most controversial undercover operations in Canadian police history, 4,000 hours of audio and video recordings, a confession on camera that to this day is still disputed as genuine or coerced, a 6-year extradition battle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and a six-month trial before the case was finally solved.
This is the story of the Rafé family massacre.
A cold case that took 10 years to reach a verdict and the question that still haunts to this day.
Was justice served or are two innocent young men rotting in prison because of a staged confession.
If you are the kind of person who stays until the end of the story, who wants to know not only what happened, but why the truth remains contested more than three decades later, you have come to the right place.
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To understand this case, you have to understand who the Rafé family was.
Tariq Rafé was born in Pakistan, studied structural engineering, and spent his career building projects around the world.
He was a quiet, hard-working man, the type who believed good work would speak for itself.
His wife, Sultana, was the pillar of the family in the way mothers so often are, but are rarely acknowledged.
She handled everything from meals to the children’s education, keeping the household running while her husband traveled for work.
Their daughter, Bosma, 20, was autistic.
Bosma needed lifelong special care and was completely dependent on her parents.
She had no ability to defend herself.
She had no ability to tell anyone what had happened to her.
And then there was Atiff, the only son, 18, intelligent, ambitious, having just finished his first year at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, one of the most prestigious universities in America.
The Rafé family had lived in West Vancouver, British Columbia for many years before Tariq decided to move the whole family to Belleview, Washington in early 1994.
Belleview is a wealthy suburb east of Seattle, a place of quiet neighborhoods with spacious homes and neighbors who rarely asked questions.
The Somerset neighborhood where the Rafes bought their house sat on a hill overlooking Lake Washington.
It was the kind of place people moved to when they wanted safety.
The family had been living there about 4 months when the summer of 1994 arrived.
Atiff came home for summer break and he brought his best friend Sebastian Burns.
Sebastian and Atiff had known each other since high school in West Vancouver.
Sebastian was a young man of English background, raised in a loving middle-class family on the Northshore.
He played classical cello, had a bright appearance, and was the kind of young man neighbors would describe as polite.
Sebastian’s parents, Dave and Jean Burns, were proud of their son.
Nothing in Sebastian’s past suggested violence.
Nothing in Aif’s past suggested violence.
Two 18-year-old young men, intelligent, educated, from stable families in one of the wealthiest areas of Canada.
That was the picture everyone saw from the outside.
The night of July 12th, 1994.
According to the accounts of Aif and Sebastian, that evening, they left the Rafé family home around 8:00 pm They went to a restaurant in Belleview, ate a light meal from about 8:45 to 9:25.
Then they went to a movie at a local theater.
They said that when they returned home sometime after midnight, they discovered the scene.
At 2:00 am on July 13th, Sebastian Burns called 911 from the Rafé family home.
His voice on the 911 line was described as unusually calm for someone who had just found three people beaten nearly to death.
Belleview police arrived at the scene and found Tar Rafé lying dead in one room, Sultana Rafé dead in another.
Both had been beaten with a hard object, later identified as an aluminum baseball bat.
The wounds to the victim’s heads and faces showed the attacker had struck repeatedly with extreme force.
A state blood stain pattern analyst later opined that the blood patterns around Tar indicated there had been two attackers.
Bosma was found still alive but very severely injured.
She was taken to the hospital but died that morning.
Detective Bob Thompson who took charge of the case from the first night and would pursue it for the next 10 years arrived at the scene and began documenting everything.
Police separated Aif and Sebastian and interviewed them separately.
Both gave detailed accounts of where they had been that evening, which restaurant, which theater, what movie, but were suspiciously vague about the critical moments at the crime scene.
They could remember exactly what time they left the restaurant, but could not clearly remember what they saw when they opened the door.
Detective Thompson noted that.
He also noted something else.
Neither Aif nor Sebastian displayed emotions appropriate to the situation.
No crying, no panic, no collapse.
Two 18-year-old young men who had just discovered their friend’s family massacred, and they answered police questions as if they were reporting a car theft.
Detectives interviewed both of them for three consecutive days, but did not gather enough evidence to hold them.
There were no fingerprints of a Tif or Sebastian at locations connected to the crime.
No DNA, no weapon.
The baseball bat was not found at the scene.
They were released.
And this is when things began to get even stranger.
On the evening of July 14th, only one day after three members of Af’s family had been beaten to death, police discovered Aif and Sebastian at a video rental store in Belleview, renting movies to watch.
On July 15th, Rafé relatives gathered in Belleview to bury Tariq, Sultana, and Basma.
Atifrafé, the only son, the only heir, the only remaining member of the immediate family, was not present.
On the same day as the funeral, Aif and Sebastian took a bus from Belleview back to Vancouver, Canada.
The Canadian consulate had contacted Belleview police in advance about the trip.
Police allowed them to leave and just like that, the two primary suspects in the massacre of three people disappeared across an international border.
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In Vancouver, Aifra and Sebastian Burns returned to life as if nothing had happened.
They rented a house in North Vancouver with a third friend, Jimmy Mioshi, a young man of Japanese background who had also attended the same high school with them in West Vancouver.
Belleview police sent detectives to Vancouver to continue questioning but failed.
On the advice of their lawyers, Aif and Sebastian completely stopped cooperating with American investigators.
They did not answer the phone.
They did not open the door.
Every channel of communication was cut off.
And because both were Canadian citizens on Canadian soil, Belleview police had no legal authority to compel them to cooperate.
This was a murder that occurred in the United States with suspects in Canada and no treaty or mechanism that allowed American detectives simply to cross the border and arrest someone without formal charges.
The case began to freeze.
But while the two young men thought they were safe, Belleview police were still building the case piece by piece, slowly and patiently, Detective Bob Thompson began compiling a detailed file on the behavior of Aif and Sebastian in the 72 hours after the murders.
Every small detail was recorded.
the meal at the Belleview restaurant from 8:45 to 9:25 pm on July 12th, the movie tickets, the start and end times of the film, and a question that prosecutors would raise years later.
Did the two young men have enough time to leave the theater in the middle of the movie, commit the murders, and return before the film ended? Detectives checked and discovered that the alarm systems on the theat’s emergency exits had not been triggered that night.
That meant someone could have left the theater through an emergency exit without anyone knowing.
Not evidence, but a troubling gap in the alibi story.
Then Thompson uncovered another detail.
In Vancouver, Atif and Sebastian were not just living normally.
They began writing a screenplay.
The content of the screenplay, two best friends accused of killing a family.
They were writing about the exact situation they were in.
Not random fiction, not an innocent coincidence.
They were turning their own case into entertainment.
And when Thompson dug deeper into Sebastian Burns’s past, he found something that kept him awake.
At West Vancouver Secondary School, Sebastian had performed in a play called Rope.
The play was based on the work of Patrick Hamilton and told the story of two young men who commit the perfect murder.
They believe their superior intellect will allow them to get away with it.
And in the version Sebastian performed, the weapon used was a baseball bat, the same type of weapon that killed the Rafé family.
Thompson believed the fictional murder story had inspired the real crime.
But believing is not proving, and that was the core problem Belleview police faced.
The entire case against Atif and Sebastian was circumstantial.
suspicious behavior, no tears, no funeral attendance, fleeing across the border, the screenplay, the high school play.
Each piece suggested, but none proved.
There was no physical evidence directly linking Aif or Sebastian to the murders.
No fingerprints at the crime scene, no DNA, no fibers, no hair.
Both were tested for blood traces on their hair and bodies immediately after the murders, and the results showed only extremely minute traces, not enough to conclude anything.
The baseball bat was never found.
The murder weapon disappeared completely.
And while Belleview police focused on Atiff and Sebastian, another lead emerged from an entirely different direction.
The FBI contacted the Belleview Police Department with information from a confidential RCMP source.
This source told RCMP Chief Jelenus about a man who had been paid $20,000 for a contract to kill an East Indian family that had previously lived in Vancouver and had moved to Belleview, Washington.
The details matched the Rafé family in an alarmingly precise way.
The person behind the murder for hire contract was said to be connected to a religious dispute at a local mosque.
Before his death, Tariq Rafé had publicly opposed the direction of prayer at a mosque in Vancouver, arguing that the mosque was not oriented correctly toward Mecca.
This was not a minor disagreement in the community.
It involved donation money, power on the mosque board, and deep personal conflicts.
The RCMP source said the person responsible for ordering the hit had previously ordered another murder.
At the time Belleview police received this information, they did not yet know that the murder weapon was an aluminum baseball bat.
And the source also did not know that detail, which meant the source could not have fabricated the story based on public information because the detail about the weapon had not been released.
This was a substantial lead, but Belleview police dismissed it.
Detective Thompson and his colleagues considered the theory of a murder for hire over a dispute about prayer direction far-fetched.
They did not believe a family would be wiped out over a few degrees on a compass.
That decision would be heavily criticized for years afterward.
Supporters of ATF and Sebastian argued that police had ignored an important lead because they had already decided who the perpetrators were before they had the evidence.
They said Belleview police suffered from tunnel vision, seeing only what they wanted to see and ignoring everything that did not fit their theory.
The prosecution countered that the murder for hire theory had no physical evidence to support it.
Exactly like the case against Atiff and Sebastian had no physical evidence to support it.
The only difference was that police chose to believe one theory and ignore the other.
By the end of 1994, the case was in a state of complete deadlock.
Belleview police believed at and Sebastian were the perpetrators, but did not have enough evidence to obtain arrest warrants.
The two suspects lived freely in Canada, protected by lawyers, and there was no legal reason to force them to return to the United States.
The case went cold.
The file pages began to gather dust.
And in a small police office in Belleview, Detective Bob Thompson looked at the crime scene photographs every day and wondered whether justice would ever come for the Rafé family.
The answer would come, but it would come from a direction no one expected, and it would carry with it ethical questions that the justice systems of two countries are still debating to this day.
In January 1995, 9 months after the massacre and with no significant progress, the Belleview Police Department officially requested the assistance of the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This decision changed the entire case, not because the RCMP had better detectives or better technology, but because they had a tool that American police did not have and were not allowed to use.
That tool was called Mr. Big.
The Mr. Big tactic was developed by the RCMP in British Columbia with the first recorded case in March 1965.
It was typically used in cold murder cases where there was a suspect but not enough evidence for an arrest.
The mechanism worked as follows.
Undercover RCMP officers created an entirely fictional criminal organization.
They approached the suspect and gradually recruited that person into the gang.
The suspect was given small illegal jobs, paid handsomely, given use of luxury cars, put up in luxury hotels, and gradually came to believe he was working for a real powerful criminal organization.
After weeks or months of building trust, the suspect was brought to meet Mr. Big, the fictional boss of the organization.
Mr. Big told the suspect that to be fully trusted and to advance in the organization, the suspect had to prove he was trustworthy by recounting the most serious crime he had ever committed.
That was the pivotal moment.
The suspect, believing he was talking to a major criminal rather than police, confessed, and the entire conversation was secretly recorded and filmed.
By 2008, the RCMP had carried out more than 350 Mr. Big operations.
The tactic was completely legal in Canada at the time, but it was illegal in the United States, where the law regarded it as a form of inducement and coercion that violated a suspect’s constitutional rights.
That detail would become extremely important later.
In the spring of 1995, the RCMP received Canadian court authorization to secretly surveil Burns and Rafé.
They were allowed to wiretap phones, place recording devices in vehicles, and even break into the house in North Vancouver where Aif Sebastian and Jimmy Moshi were living to install listening devices and steal Rafé’s diary.
The operation began when an undercover RCMP officer named Gary approached Sebastian Burns and introduced him into the world of the fictional criminal organization.
Sebastian was given small jobs depositing illegal money into banks and was paid for each one.
Luxury cars, luxury hotels, easy cash, guns displayed as props of power.
Sebastian, 19 years old, living on limited money in Vancouver, began to like the life this fictional organization offered.
He did not just participate, he sought them out.
For months, the undercover officers built relationships with both Sebastian and Aif.
Every meeting, every phone call, every meal was recorded.
4,000 hours of audio and video.
That is more than 166 continuous days if played without pause.
Then came the decisive step.
Sebastian was taken to Victoria, British Columbia to meet Al Hasllett, the RCMP officer playing Mr. Big, the boss of the organization.
Hlett was a veteran officer who specialized in playing the boss in Mr. Big operations.
He knew how to apply pressure without revealing himself as a police officer.
Hasllett told Sebastian that the organization already knew exactly what had happened in Belleview.
He said they had a memo from Belleview police listing physical evidence linking Sebastian to the murders.
That memo did not exist.
It was a completely fabricated prop.
But Sebastian believed it was real.
Hasllett offered to help destroy that fake memo.
But first, he said he needed Sebastian to describe exactly how he had killed the Rafé family, so the organization would know who it was protecting and what it was protecting them from.
On July 18th, 1995, exactly 1 year and 6 days after the murders, the camera was rolling as Sebastian Burns sat in a hotel room in Victoria and recounted how he killed the Rafé family.
He described using a baseball bat to beat each victim.
He talked about Bosma.
He provided details that according to the prosecution only the killer would know.
According to the defense, those details had either already been made public or had been supplied to Sebastian by the undercover officers throughout the operation.
Aif Rafé was also brought to Victoria.
When Al Hasllett asked Aif how it felt to kill his parents and take down his sister, Rafé replied that they did it for the family’s insurance money.
He said he felt pretty bad, but it was offset by the fact that he felt it was necessary to achieve what he wanted to achieve in this life.
Rafé called the death of his family a sacrifice.
In another surveillance video, a secret camera in the hotel room captured Aif and Sebastian sitting together and laughing about the night the Rafé family was killed.
They did not know they were being filmed.
They did not know every word they said was being recorded by the very people they believed were their allies.
With the confession on camera, the RCMP moved quickly.
On July 31st, 1995, exactly 1 year and 18 days after the massacre, Sebastian Burns and Aif Rafé were arrested at the rented house in the Vancouver suburbs.
The RCMP charged them as fugitives.
The same day, they were charged in King County, Washington with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder each.
The motive, according to prosecutors, half a million dollars from the life insurance and real estate of the Rafé family.
But from the moment the handcuffs locked, a massive legal question hung over the entire case.
The confession had been obtained using a tactic that was illegal in the United States.
The Mr. big operation used inducement, deception, implied threats, and psychological pressure at a level that American courts considered a violation of the fifth and 14th amendments to the Constitution.
The most important evidence in the case had been collected by a method that if American police had used it on American soil, would have been thrown out of court immediately.
But because the RCMP were Canadian police operating on Canadian soil under Canadian law, the question became, could evidence collected legally in one country be used in a trial in another country where that method of collection was considered illegal? That question would take nearly a decade to answer.
And the answer would shape not only the fate of Aif Rafé and Sebastian Burns, but also how two nations view the boundary between justice and coercion.
Immediately after their arrest in July 1995, the legal battle began.
The first issue was extradition.
Both were Canadian citizens arrested on Canadian soil, and the United States government wanted to bring them to Washington to stand trial on three counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
In the state of Washington, aggravated murder could carry the death penalty.
And that is where everything became complicated.
Defense attorneys resisted extradition with the argument that Canada should not hand over its own citizens to a country that could kill them.
The case escalated through successive levels of Canadian courts, the British Columbia Provincial Court, the Court of Appeal, and finally the Supreme Court of Canada.
In 2001, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark ruling in United States versus Burns.
The court ruled that extraditing Burns and Rafé to the United States to face the possibility of the death penalty violated section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, violated the principles of fundamental justice, and would shock the conscience of the Canadian public.
This ruling did not affect only the Rafé Burns case.
It established a legal precedent for all of Canada’s extradition law, forcing any country seeking the extradition of a Canadian citizen to guarantee that the death penalty would not be applied.
The King County prosecutors in Washington agreed.
They committed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for extradition.
With that commitment, Burns and Rafé were finally transferred from Canada to the United States.
They had been held in Canada continuously since 1995.
When they set foot in Seattle, they were 25 years old.
6 years had passed since the day of their arrest.
Nearly 7 years since the night the Rafé family was murdered.
On April 7th, 2001, Aif Rafé and Sebastian Burns appeared before Judge Michael Spearman in King County Superior Court in Seattle and entered not guilty p on all charges.
Defense attorneys immediately filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that their client’s right to a speedy and fair trial had been violated.
6 years of pre-trial detention, they argued, was unconstitutional.
The court denied the motion.
What followed were months of pre-trial arguments.
The defense fought to exclude the evidence from the Mr. big operation, arguing that the confessions had been coerced by tactics that were illegal in the United States and should not be allowed to be presented to a jury.
Judge Charles Martell, who ultimately presided over the trial, issued a ruling limiting some of the evidence the jury would be permitted to consider, but allowing the bulk of the video and audio recordings from the Mr. Big operation to be presented.
That decision was the heaviest blow to the defense.
Without the confession videos, the prosecution almost had no case.
With the confession videos, they had everything.
The trial officially began in late November 2003 and would last 6 months.
Prosecutors Jeffrey Baird and James Con led the prosecution.
Their strategy rested on three pillars.
First, the physical evidence at the Rafé home, including bloodstain analysis showing there had been two attackers.
Second, the testimony of Jimmy Moshi, the key witness.
And third, the confession videos from the Mr. Big operation.
Jimmy Moshi was the most complicated piece in the entire case.
He was a close high school friend of both Atif and Sebastian, lived with them in the house in North Vancouver after the murders, and was arrested along with them in July 1995 on conspiracy to commit murder charges.
In October 1995, Moshi signed an immunity agreement with Canadian prosecutors.
In exchange for not being prosecuted, he agreed to testify fully about everything he knew concerning the murders.
And what he testified was extremely damaging to Atiff and Sebastian.
Moshi said that both Aiff and Sebastian had told him about the plan to kill the Rafé family before the murders occurred.
He heard one of the two say that beating them with a baseball bat would be quick and painless.
After the murders, Rafi and Burns recounted the events to Moshi.
Burns beat the victims with the bat while Rafi stood still in place.
Burns said that it was neither easy nor pleasant, but once the first blow had been struck, there was no going back.
Moshi also testified that Rafi told him Bosma was still alive when they left the house.
They left her there mortally wounded alone in the house with the bodies of her parents.
That detail, if true, was one of the most cruel moments in the entire case.
But Moshi was not a simple witness.
After signing the agreement, he left Canada and moved to Japan.
He changed his name to James Hiroshi Kira to sever every link to the case.
He refused to return to Seattle to testify in person.
He resisted testifying so strongly that the court had to use previously recorded testimony instead of live testimony.
The jury watched Moshi’s testimony on video rather than seeing him sit in front of them.
That meant the defense could not cross-examine the prosecution’s most important witness directly in the courtroom.
On the video, Burns’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Robinson, attacked Moshi point by point.
Robinson pointed out inconsistencies in Moshi’s statements across different interviews.
Moshi had changed his story multiple times.
He admitted having lied in some of his earlier statements, and he clearly had a motive to testify against his friends because the immunity agreement meant he would walk free entirely if he testified in the direction the prosecution wanted.
The defense argued that Moshi had been coerced into saying whatever the prosecutors wanted to hear in order to save himself.
Throughout the six-month trial, the prosecutors presented a succession of experts and witnesses.
Bloodstain analysis experts testified about the patterns at the scene, showing that someone had stood still in one position while the attack on Tariq took place, consistent with the theory that Rafé stood watching while Burns struck the blows.
But under cross-examination, the experts admitted that bloodstain analysis is not an exact science and that their conclusions were expert opinions rather than absolute proof.
The prosecutors also presented a financial motive.
After the deaths of the Rafé family, Aif stood to inherit approximately $500,000 from the family’s real estate and life insurance policies.
The prosecution argued that this was the reason Rafé wanted his family dead and that Burns helped him carry it out in exchange for a share.
The defense countered that Aif was studying at Cornell on a scholarship, had a bright future, and had no need to kill his family for money.
And then came the evidence around which the entire trial revolved.
The videos from the Mr. Big operation.
The jury watched the segments of Sebastian Burns sitting in a hotel room in Victoria, describing how he killed each member of the Rafé family to Al Hasllett, the man he believed was a crime boss.
They watched the segment of a Tif Rafé calling the deaths of his family a necessary sacrifice.
They watched the two young men laughing about the night of the murders.
Those images would be hard for any juror to erase from their minds.
The defense struck back with the argument that the confessions were false.
Burns had fabricated the story to impress the people he believed were gangsters.
He wanted to be accepted into the criminal organization and said whatever he thought they wanted to hear.
The defense also pointed out that the RCMP officers had used implied threats, promises, and extreme psychological pressure throughout the 5-month operation.
They had created a world in which Burns believed his life depended on saying exactly what the boss wanted to hear.
In that context, the defense asked, “Could a 19-year-old say anything, even confessed to a murder he did not commit, simply in order to survive?” That was the question the 12 jurors would have to answer.
In the final days of the six-month trial, Sebastian Burns made a decision that his defense attorneys almost certainly had opposed.
He voluntarily took the witness stand and testified on his own behalf.
This was the biggest gamble in the entire case.
Burns looked straight at the jury and told his story.
He said the confessions on the video were completely false.
He said he had made everything up to impress the people he believed were gangsters.
He said he was afraid.
He said he was a 19-year-old pulled into a fake criminal world from which he could not escape.
and that saying what the boss wanted to hear was the only way to survive.
He called his confessions false confessions.
Prosecutor James Conit did not miss the opportunity.
He confronted Burns on every single detail.
He asked why Burns was laughing on camera while talking about the deaths of his best friend’s family if he was innocent.
He asked why Burns provided specific details about how each victim was killed if he had not been there.
He asked why Burns sought out the fake criminal organization instead of staying away from them if he had nothing to hide.
Burns answered each question, but every answer opened up further questions.
After the trial, Conut said that Burns’s story about the false confessions on the witness stand was almost as bad as the confession he had given the undercover RCMP officers when describing how he killed the Rafé family.
Conit also said that Burns’s decision to testify and the RCMP investigation played a very large role in the jury’s verdict.
He believed Burns would have been convicted with or without the confessions, but that Burns placing himself in front of the jury had sealed the result.
On May 21st, 2004, after 6 months of trial, the case was given to the jury.
12 people, six men and six women, were sent into the deliberation room.
What happened next lasted 3 and 1/2 days.
The jury debated.
They reviewed the evidence.
They reviewed the videos.
They weighed Moshi’s testimony, Burns’s testimony, the bloodstain analysis, the financial motive, and the behavior after the murders.
And on May 26th, 2004, nearly 10 years after the night three members of the Rafé family were beaten to death in the house in Belleview, the jury returned to the courtroom.
Before the verdict was read, Judge Charles Martell called the lawyers for both sides into a private room where he revealed a question from the jury.
They wanted to know whether they could attend the sentencing hearing.
That question said everything.
The verdict was read, “Guilty, unanimous.
Glenn Sebastian Burns and Aif Ahmmed Rafé each guilty on all three counts of aggravated first-degree murder for the beating deaths of Tariq Sultana and Bosma Rafi in Belleview in 1994.
The jury agreed that there were two aggravating circumstances.
The murders were committed for money and they were part of a common scheme.
With those two aggravating circumstances, only one sentence was possible under Washington state law once the death penalty had been removed.
Three consecutive life sentences.
No possibility of parole.
Burns and Rafé, 28 years old, would die in prison.
The courtroom was silent for a moment and then erupted.
Burns’s family and defense team refused to speak with reporters as they left the courtroom.
On the other side, prosecutor Roger Davidiser told reporters that there was nothing to celebrate in a case like this, that a family had been wiped out and two young men had lost their lives to prison.
He also said that Burns and Rafé believed they could commit the perfect murder and 12 good citizens of this county had proven that they could not.
David Heiser emphasized that without the RCMP investigation, including approximately 4,000 hours of audio and video surveillance of the defendants, Burns and Rafé would have gotten away with murder.
Detective Bob Thompson, who had followed the case from the first night 10 years earlier, said the result was both bitter and sweet.
Prosecutor Conat noted that the case had taken nearly 10 years, which he called a very, very long time.
He thanked the perseverance of the Belleview Police Department, the King County Prosecutors, and especially the RCMP.
Some of the jurors remained in the courtroom after the trial to talk about the case.
All 12 were later taken for psychological counseling.
The entire jury, what they had seen and heard over 6 months had left its mark.
Appeals began almost immediately.
Defense attorneys argued that the evidence from the Mr. big operation should not have been admitted in an American court because those tactics were illegal on American soil.
They argued that the 10-year delay between the crime and the verdict had stripped their clients of the right to a fair trial.
They argued that the undercover operation used implied threats of violence, promises, and psychological coercion to extract false confessions from two young men.
The Washington State Court of Appeals reviewed every argument and rejected them all.
The court ruled that the Mr. Big operation did not violate the defendant’s constitutional rights because it had been conducted by Canadian police on Canadian soil under Canadian law.
The defense continued the appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court.
It was denied.
They petitioned the United States Supreme Court for review.
The court declined to hear the case.
In March 2013, the Washington State Supreme Court denied Rafé and Burns’s final request for reconsideration of the verdict.
Every legal avenue in the American justice system had closed.
But the story did not end there.
In 2014, a ruling in Canada shook the entire foundation on which the Rafé Burns case stood.
In R versus Hart, the Supreme Court of Canada comprehensively reviewed the Mr. Big tactic for the first time.
The heart case involved a man convicted of murdering his two young daughters based entirely on confessions from a Mr. Big operation.
The Supreme Court of Canada did not ban Mr. Big entirely, but it imposed important restrictions.
The court ruled that confessions from Mr. Big operations would henceforth be treated as presumptively inadmissible, meaning prosecutors must prove that the probitative value of the confession outweighs its prejuditial effect on the defendant.
The court also required trial courts to assess the level of coercion in the operation, including threats of violence, financial inducements, and psychological pressure.
If the level of coercion was too high, the confession would be excluded.
The R versus Hart ruling essentially said that the Mr. Big tactic carries the risk of producing unreliable confessions.
Aif Rafi from prison told the CBC that he wanted the case reopened based on the heart ruling.
He publicly attacked the Mr. Big tactic, saying he had felt extremely threatened throughout the undercover operation.
But there was a legal problem that no Canadian ruling could solve.
Rafé and Burns had been tried and convicted in the United States, not Canada.
The R versus Hart ruling applied to Canadian courts, not American courts, and the American courts had already refused to reconsider the case.
The Hart ruling changed the way Canada viewed Mr. big.
It did not change the sentences of Burns and Rafé.
In September 2017, 13 years after the verdict and 23 years after the murders, the Rafae Burns case exploded back into public view in a way no one had predicted.
Netflix released the documentary series The Confession Tapes and the first two episodes titled True East focused entirely on the Rafé family massacre and the convictions of Burns and Rafé.
Filmmaker Kelly Ldenberg, 32 years old and based in Los Angeles, had spent 2 years researching the case.
She learned of it through Richard Leo, a leading American expert on false confessions.
Ldenberg filed Freedom of Information Act requests with American investigative agencies and collected thousands of pages of investigative notes.
She interviewed the Burns family, defense attorneys, legal experts, and people who believed Burns and Rafé were innocent.
The series had no external commentary, no narrator telling the audience what to think.
Instead, it presented evidence from both sides and left viewers to draw their own conclusions.
But the way the series was edited, the details emphasized, and the details omitted clearly lean toward the argument that Burns and Rafé had given false confessions and were being held unjustly.
The impact of the confession tapes was immediate and powerful.
Millions of viewers around the world heard about the case for the first time.
Social media erupted with debates.
Many people were outraged by the Mr. Big tactics and demanded the case be reopened.
King County prosecutor Dan Sadderberg was forced to issue a public statement in response.
He said the series did not present a full or fair picture of the evidence in the case and directed readers to the appellet judges decisions to see the complete picture.
He asserted that a full and fair review of the evidence simply did not support the claim that Burns and Rafé had given false confessions.
Innocence International, the organization founded by Reuben Hurricane Carter, the famous former boxer who had been wrongfully convicted and served nearly 20 years before being exonerated, responded to the prosecutor’s statement with a detailed rebuttal.
The organization wrote that the prosecutor said the series did not recount the forensic evidence linking Burns and Rafé to the murders, and the reason the series did not recount forensic evidence was simply that there was none.
If there had been forensic evidence tying them to the crime, no innocence organization would have taken the case.
Innocence International also pointed out that portions of the video from the Mr. Big operation that did not support the conviction and that the jury never saw had been destroyed or lost.
4,000 hours of audio and video, but the jury saw only the segments the prosecutors chose to present.
The rest disappeared.
Before Netflix, three innocence organizations had taken the case.
Innocence International, the Innocence Project Northwest at the University of Washington, and the Idaho Innocence Project.
Ken Klonssky, director of Innocence International, said there were approximately 65 to 70 innocence organizations in the United States and that two of them had taken Sebastian and Aif’s case before Innocence International joined.
Klonsky also acknowledged a problem that supporters of Burns and Rafé faced.
They were not easy figures to sympathize with.
Two intelligent, cold young men who rented movies the day after their friend’s family was murdered, skipped the funeral, wrote a film script about their own situation, laughed on camera while talking about the night of the murders.
Even if the confessions were false, even if they were truly innocent, their behavior made it very difficult for the public to side with them.
But Klonsky argued that strange behavior is not evidence.
People react to trauma in different ways, and convicting someone because they did not cry at the right time or did not behave in the way society expected is a dangerous mistake of the justice system.
Tiffany Burns, Sebastian’s sister, had spent most of her adult life fighting for her brother.
In 2007, she directed and produced a documentary titled Mr. Big, analyzing the RCMP’s undercover tactics, not only in the Rafé Burns case, but in many other cases as well.
The film screened at international film festivals and brought the Mr. Big tactic before a global public.
Tiffany said she wanted the RCMP to stop using this tactic entirely because it produced unreliable confessions and destroyed the lives of people who might be innocent.
Sebastian’s parents, Dave and Jean Burns, never stopped believing their son was innocent.
They remained steadfast from the first day to the last.
Today, Sebastian Burns and Aif Rafé are serving their sentences in two separate prisons in the state of Washington.
Their sentences are the equivalent of 99 years.
Three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
The lives of the two men in prison are completely different, but both still maintain their innocence.
They have been in prison for more than three decades.
They were arrested at age 19.
If they are guilty, they are paying the price for the most brutal crime imaginable, killing their own family for money.
If they are innocent, they are two of the most tragic victims of a justice system that can make mistakes.
The legacy of the Rafae Burns case extends far beyond the two individual sentences.
The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2001 ruling in United States versus Burns established the precedent that Canada will not extradite citizens to a place where the death penalty exists without a commitment to remove that penalty.
The 2014 R versus Hart ruling imposed restrictions on the Mr. Big tactic, requiring Canadian courts to assess the reliability of confessions and the level of coercion in the undercover operation before admitting the evidence.
The case also became a focal point in the global debate over false confessions, over the boundary between investigation and coercion, and over the question of whether the justice system can correct its own mistakes.
On the night of July 12th, 1994, three members of the Rafé family were beaten to death in the house they had moved into only 4 months earlier.
Tariq Rafé, the father, a construction engineer who built projects around the world.
Sultana Rafé, the mother who held the family together.
Basma Rafé, the 20-year-old autistic girl who had no ability to defend herself.
They deserve to be remembered not for the way they died but for the way they lived.
And the question this case leaves behind.
The question that more than 30 years later still has no final answer is not whether Burns and Rafé were convicted.
They were convicted.
The question is whether that conviction was correct.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
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